Verizon Mulling Wired Broadband Pricing Tiers For 4G Wireless

What if the wireless industry started selling its data plans like the cable industry: the faster the connection, the more you pay? That’s one of the options that Verizon is currently considering for its 4G (LTE) network. Though the company hasn’t yet decided how it wants to slice up its 4G data plans, divvying it up by speed would be a major divergence from what US wireless carriers have traditionally done.

In fact, Verizon may take it one step further than splitting things up into good, better, and best speeds. The company may combine those tiers with download limits per tier — a sort of mishmash between what most US cell carriers already offer and something new.

“If you want to pay for less speed, you’ll pay for less speed and consume more, or you can pay for high speed and consume less,” Verizon CFO Fran Shammo told the Wall Street Journal in an interview.

So far, 4G (WiMAX) data in the US has been unrestricted as the cell carriers focus on locking down their 3G networks. Sprint VP of 4G Todd Rowley said recently that that its users currently download about 7GB per month—two gigs per month higher than the data limit on the 3G network—and that’s okay. The company is still trying to attract new users to its higher-speed network and doesn’t plan to start capping downloads unless data use explodes to something closer to 20GB per month, Rowley said.

Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg agreed that unlimited data plans won’t necessarily disappear, but said the company is still working through what’s fair to the customer. It seems inevitable that there will be a shift to 4G tiers as more customers get on board, though, and Verizon thinks the launch of its LTE network is the right time to introduce tiered service. Verizon expects 75 percent of its contract customers to be using data in the next three to four years, and it wants to be prepared to make those customers open their wallets.

In a related tidbit, Seidenberg added that Verizon’s LTE network is what got Apple to let the carrier start selling iPad + MiFi bundles. He stopped short of saying that Apple was going to launch the iPhone on Verizon thanks to LTE, though (a belief that we hold here at the Ars Orbiting HQ). Seidenberg left that question hanging and simply said, “Our interests are beginning to come together more but they have to take steps to align their technology with ours.”